Hello and Welcome to the Dark Wood

The wonderful Australian singer Wendy Rule has said, "the Earth teaches us that darkness and death are necessary aspects of life. There can be no Summer without Winter, nor day without night. As creatures of Earth, we too need these periods of stillness, darkness and solitude. We must remember that the seed needs time below the ground if it is to germinate."

This has been a very important thing for me to realise. For many years I have suffered from depression and anxiety and I have felt - and been told - that the dark must be repressed. Be cheerful. And certainly this is true to an extent. As much as it is a mistake to try to be cheerful and bright all the time, it is equally wrong to paint everything black. Whenever the scale is out of balance, things go awry. And for a very long time, I have regarded myself as a conflicted personality. I am drawn to the fluffiest of the cute yet also the bleakest of the dark. Yet, is this really conflict? Or are they simply two sides of my personality which need to co-exist in order to make me me?

To quote Wendy again: "(We live) in a culture that shuns the dark, that regards the descent into the sacred Underworld as a disease which requires medication not meditation". Andrea Haugen (alias the German singer Nebelhexe) similarly writes in her book The Ancient Fires of Midgard, "Christianity has taught us duality, the narrow idea of good and evil and the struggle between the two. Cutting off one half of a whole creates severe disharmony. Because of this view that things are either good or evil, never in-between, people can no longer think in a balanced way."

And so it is that I now have two blogs - one 'In a yellow wood' and one 'In a dark wood'. Not diametrically opposed but simply different halves of the same whole that is Feronia. Each will explore themes and interests particular to their own half - apart but never disconnected.